Trumpington War Memorial

It has been too long. I have been getting very slack, or perhaps just busy. The dissertations are winding down but I have been sneaking in a few last field trips as a reluctant goodbye. When the sun appeared in the afternoon on Tuesday I cycled to Trumpington in the manic winds. In this small village is a war memorial designed by Eric Gill.

In full view of the incongruous cars I took a few photos on the dying batteries of my camera as I circled the War Memorial. It turned out to be a longer trek into the suburban backs of Cambridge than I had imagined so I made a careful and ponderous loop of the memorial to justify the trip.

It makes me wonder how many monuments and memorials designed by Eric Gill lie forgotten in the unassuming rural fringes of Britain. I wonder now if I have passed sculpture and carved stone without realising what I was seeing, and, if in the future there will be recognition.

My various pilgrimages to seek out the work of Gill have proved how deeply embedded he is within a not so distant, still influential, British culture. The mark of Gill is there on some subconscious level, a lens through which we view sculpture, inscription, typography and architecture.

Book Design

I should be finishing up my first dissertation but I keep reading and this continually opens up new angles. Over the past few days I have been following up a few ideas about the significance of fully-integrated book design in Jones' poem The Anathemata. Part of my argument is that the physical book of The Anathemata becomes a sign in itself, an object which the reader uses to perform an 'anamnesis' , like the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. It suddenly occurred to me that treating the book as a utile sign in itself has its roots in a far deeper history. Gill and Jones were involved with the private printing presses of Hilary Pepler and Robert Gibbings; The St. Dominic's press at Ditchling and The Golden Cockerel Press. Anyway this has led me down the criss-crossing history paths of further research. This further 'research' mostly involves requesting the most beautiful books from the stacks and absorbing every minute detail of its design. I have been reading about the history of these two presses, feeling the quality of its paper choices beneath my fingertips, seeing carefully selected typefaces which have been handset, and perhaps best of all admiring the specially commissioned wood cuts and engravings which revived a dying art.

Eric Gill, Four Gospels

There are two masterworks I have been studying. The first is Eric Gill's Four Gospels for the Golden Cockerel Press. Gibbings gave Gill the typeface as a framework and the engravings grew from this. As I looked through the pages I could sense the perfected unity which this process of working had produced. The letters are interwoven with the designs, so that story and illustration are an integrated and fluent whole.

I am very tempted to take this page and head my dissertation with it, at the moment I have a simple quotation 'In the beginning was the Word [...] The Word made flesh.' but perhaps this invokes so much more?

It is clear from these pages and excerpts the extent to which Gill was experimenting with typography, layout and the relationship between visual and linguistic arrangements of meaning. This is one of the side effects of my dissertation, that suddenly I have this overwhelming appreciation for typography. Typography which once seemed the most incidental of things has become this vessel of resonant meaning.

I read somewhere that copies of Gill's The Four Gospels now sell for around £5000. This moment in the University Library, touching vellum and hand-pressed paper, is the closest I will ever get to such essential perfection!

For David Jones' masterwork of Book Design I looked to the Chester Play of the Deluge which he produced woodcuts for in 1927 for the Golden Cockerel Press. The collaboration with Robert Gibbings on this project enabled him to take more of an interest in layout and to produce woodblocks of an even greater complexity. The engravings are dark, compact knots of energy. They capture the chaos and power of the biblical story of Noah. My attention was directed towards The Deluge mostly because of a scholar called Thomas Dilworth who writes that Jones's Anathemata takes its spatial structure from an artistic development that Jones made in these same woodcuts.

The Deluge, David Jones

Building the Ark, Jones

After the Deluge, Jones

While I agree with Dilworth's description of the spatial structuring in these woodcuts, the point I want to make about David Jones' and his involvement with book design is something very different. But I'm not going to give anything away in that regard...

This remains as a glimpse in to my afternoon of discovery, I hope you have a feel for something significant and exciting in this.

Word made Flesh

In 1909, while his wife Mary Gill was pregnant, Eric Gill made his first stone carving. It was the incarnation of frustrated sexual desire, a body which replaced the one he could not have access to; 'Lord! How exciting! - and not merely touching and seeing her but actually making her. I was responsible for her very existence and and her every form came straight out of my heart.' In sculpting Gill became a Pygmalion, treating the stone as flesh and designing his new woman.

The sculpture is sadly lost but sketches remain; we can see a woman crippled beneath the weight of desire bearing an inscription from Aeschylus' Agamemnon 'There is the sea, and who shall drain her dry?' it is an address from Clytaemnestra to her returning husband, but in this context it captures the tumultuous sea of unquenched desires.

Gill described his new discovery of an art language in the terms of letter cutting 'And this new job was the same job, only the letters were different ones. A new alphabet- the word made flesh.' The biblical references of his workman's vocabulary should not be accepted without implication. Gill's sculptures recreate the ultimate act of religious creation, transubstantiation. They make incarnate.

'For stone carving properly speaking isn't just doing things in stone or turning things into stone, a sort of petrifying process; stone carving is conceiving things in stone and conceiving them as made by carving. They are not only born but conceived in stone; they are of stone in their inmost being as well as their outmost existence.'

Eric Gill was the figure who sparked my interest in carving and it was exactly this sense of the corporeality of stone and the sensuality of sculpture, which is more than just representation, that excited me. Gill's sculptures retain the tender touch of the workman who believes in the absolute authority of his medium to translate thought and feeling in to something intelligible.

'in the beginning was a thought not a thing, and therefore it is that intelligibility is the final cause of all things.'

Reading the Workshop

Finally! My photographs, slightly grainy and far too few, of the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop are up. Despite the quality they excite me because they are richly literary. I think I described the workshop as a palimpsest, everywhere there is material to read; alphabets, quotations, rubbings, postcards and stone languages.

This is a sculpture by David Kindersley in the style of Eric Gill, in fact it could easily be mistaken for Gill. The whole body is in a taut balance of sensuality.

Above the mantelpiece examples of Kindersley alphabets can be seen climbing the white walls.

In this photograph you can see a print of one of David Jones' inscriptions which they brought down for me to see, I love its positioning in tension with the 'word made flesh' beside it, Kindersley's sculpture.

Behind the work of inscriptions are collected treasures gathered on the shelves. There are letters in the most surprising places.

Glass bottles on the shelves collect light from the high windows, filling the space with light and concentrated peace.

The attitude to work is intense, perhaps only 2 or 3 letters are inscribed in a day so an entire inscription is a work of weeks. An apprenticeship as a letter cutter is a decision of passion and dedication, three years at stone on the minimum wage, but as Lida points out it is also an inclusion in to a family.

For one morning I flirt with the idea of my own apprenticeship, is this the passion and spirituality of working practice I have been looking for? But while I am welcomed, given tea and gifts, I recognise that I am essentially an interlocutor.

Cardozo Kindersley Workshop

Quotation from John Donne- letter-cutting is literary as well as visual

There is nothing like discovering discovering that something exciting and useful has been right under your nose all this time, unnoticed. I was making a passing comment to somebody about how perfect a location Cambridge was for my dissertation; there is Kettle's Yard, David Jones's letters to Jim Ede, a Divinity Fellow with a secret stash of relics from Ditchling and then the resources of the UL. She agreed, but didn't mention any of these things, just the Kindersley workshop.

In 1934 David Kindersley was apprenticed as a stone-cutter to Eric Gill at Pigotts. Eventually, frustrated by the religious strictures of Gill's working practices, he left to start his own workshop. Now located in Cambridge (a five minute walk from me, who knew?) the workshop is passed between generations as it takes on dedicated new apprentices who have fallen in love with letters. The Kindersley workshop produces headstones, memorial plaques, street signs and a whole range of commissioned work which at times moves towards being (although 'Art' is a dangerous word for Lida) lyrical, inscribed sculptures of immense poetry.

A quotation from Salvador Dali, which comes with a story Lida is keeping alive. 'Making is breaking' she says, this is what their work is all about. In order to make an inscription they break the surface of a stone that has existed for thousands of years. The minutest of errors destroys the work.

I have just returned from my visit to the workshop, gifted with books and postcards and thoughts and ideas, which my head is brimming and swimming with. I have a love and respect for Lida Cardozo Kindersley (David's widow) who currently the runs the workshop with passion and precision but also with the spirituality of alphabets; of lines, forms and characters which have a relationship amongst themselves, with stone and with the environment they are eventually placed within. She takes me to see a headstone which will be laid out on the ground, with a sweeping gesture and the reflection of sunlight in her eyes she explains how the light of the day will change letter and stone surface, bring everything to life.

The surface of the rock already has the sea, the beach, the sky and its birds written on it.

The whole workshop is a visual palimpsest (photos will have to follow) of tablets, sculptures, rubbings, words which are pure poetry or those that become doctrines for work, postcards, drawings and a whole collage of materials collected to form a part of the workshop's atmosphere, its creatively focussed energy. I sit at a great wooden table in the centre of the workshop as coffe break begins, biscuits are passed around, everyone is reading newspapers or books, there is light chatter. Then the break is over and the whole workshop is filled with the chippings of chisel on stone, the hum of deep concentration. Lettering is a language, Lida asserts, each letter has its own character, and she goes on to talk about the joy of the letter 'Y'.

Revelation

I realise that I keep writing about art and revelations. I'm sorry if it is beginning to sound insincere, it really is very sincere. You see I'm still learning about art, I'm perpetually discovering new things and I'm still learning how to write about it. Here is a revelation, I hope you can feel its weight.

Eric Gill, Ecstasy.

I won't give you the story of this sculpture, because the story ruins it. You aren't supposed to feel this the way Gill did, you need to experience it in your own way. Gill didn't title the work either, but 'Ecstasy' is exactly what it is.

'It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over - the moment.' Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

This quotation, from Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, conveys perfectly that feeling of revelation which art can give us. It is a moment of feeling more human, feeling closer to living and life than we have ever felt before. It illuminates the world and then inspires; 'a match burning in a crocus' that is a vision, a beautiful thing we almost comprehend.

Awesome Beauty

Of all art forms perhaps our exposure to architecture is the most subconscious and the easiest to ignore. One day somebody tells you that Giles Gilbert Scott designed your university library and suddenly you see connections, the development of a legacy which up until that point you had absolutely ignored.

A picture of the Cambridge University library from the Telegraph website. Few people agree with me, but when I am inside I feel like I am in a great naval ship, climbing green-steel staircases in to the depths of its labyrinthine underbelly. I can see why people are intimidated by this building, as a copyright library it holds (or at least has to access to) every book ever printed in the UK. The classification system has descended in to a chaos of algorithms and there are hundreds of books you have to request. However if you have a real, deep passion for anything, the UL has the means of satisfying it. I have spent hours looking through hand-printed books from the St. Dominics, Golden Cockerel and Ditchling Presses or tracing a finger over the inky signature of an idol. But this is all a little off topic, the contents of the library have distracted me!

Building immense structures that embody the wasteland of industrialised England, Gilbert Scott's architectural creations are distinctive and strikingly recognisable. Filling landscapes and devastating them with their power; the Tate Modern, Battersea Power station, Liverpool Cathedral are just a few. All of these buildings would have been inconceivable once, but as plumes of smoke rise in to the air and the Thames is filled with freight ships, these structures rise out of the contemporary imagination.

A picture of the Tate Modern from the Tate website. This emptied/converted factory carries the perfect message about the movement of Modern art and its reclamation and re-designing of the past. The Tate's vast, echoing Turbine Hall is a space designed for experiments and confrontations.

On a train journey to West Dulwich I tried to steal photographs of the iconic Battersea Power Station through the windows as we passed. This is one of the nuclear photographs I captured before rushing away. Borrowed by Pink Floyd for their album cover, the power station still remains deserted, an awesome shell on the London landscape.

While doing a little research for this post I discovered that Liverpool Cathedral is also one of Scott's masterpieces. When I was at school I put together a small sketchbook of churches, cathedrals and religious architecture for an art project. Greedily absorbing interiors and exteriors as I travelled. Liverpool Cathedral was one of those marvellous discoveries you accidentally stumble upon, I remember dragging my dad in to see it after we passed it in the car.

Gilbert Scott's buildings are contemporary icons, you could dismiss them as ugly, but for me they have an awesome beauty comparable to that fear or the modern, ever-changing world.

Reasons to Smile in 2011

It seems that the end of the year is not just for one particular countdown (of which there is a very funny description at Spare Time Gone Awry), but of countdown lists, the top ten best T.V moments of 2010, the top ten news stories, blah, blah, blah. I have to admit to being a bit of a closet fan of these lists; neat and ordered. I used to make one every year, a summary of what I had done, films I had seen, countries I had visited etc. This year I don't feel like making one of these lists. I have had a very rich and full list of experiences, happinesses and achievements. However the year has not come to the best of ends and I'm not sure that recalling all of that happiness is a very useful activity. So here is a list of ten art things that I will be looking forward to in 2011. Feel free to mention the things I have missed.

1. Modern British Sculpture- Royal Academy of Arts (22nd January-7th April) This year at the Royal Academy I experienced a revelation; I had always dismissed sculpture because I didn't understand it and it didn't communicate with me. Then on the recommendation of my supervisor I went to Wild Thing and all of a sudden there was the sculpture of Eric Gill, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska speaking to me of the sensuality of stone, of its fleshly corporeality. I don't doubt that the Royal Academy will bring another challenging and astounding exhibition and offer another revelation.

'The exhibition will take a fresh approach, replacing the traditional survey with a provocative set of juxtapositions that will challenge the viewer to make new connections and break the mould of old conceptions.'

2. Shadow Catchers Symposium (4th Feb, V&A)- Yes I loved the exhibition so much I booked myself a space on the symposium like the giant art geek that I am. The artists will be speaking and so will Marina Warner (a slight and distant hero of mine). This feels like the future of photography.

3. Venice Biennale- This is a huge event and perhaps I will be there. Art, Cinema, Architecture, Dance, Music and Theatre, where else would you want to be over the summer?

4. Eric Gill: Public and Private Art, British Museum (10th February- August 7th)- I love Eric Gill and believe he deserves appreciation. My dissertation won't be finished yet either, so I can count this trip as research!

5. Barcelona- Since I am going in a couple of weeks...it looks like I will only catch the dregs of exhibitions from 2010 but this is an art city and will be a landmark of the year.

6. The Guggenheim New York- Because perhaps, just maybe, I might be here too.

7. Lucia Nogueira, Kettle's Yard (15th January-13th March)- It would be a crime to forget the treasures of exhibitions which will be occurring on my doorstep. More sculpture, Nogueira is involved with what seems to be a kind of reclamation, her work has been described as a process of 'taking things which are close to hand and imbuing them with malignancy and magic.' A lot of exciting things are happening for sculpture next year and Cambridge will be an important part of the exploration too.

'My way of thinking is very much from Brazil: my way of picking up objects comes from there too. It is something connected with childhood and also with the Brazilian psyche. Our way of thinking is not as linear as it is in Europe ... In art you obviously have a background in art history that is very rich. We don't have that in Brazil at all ... We just do everything in a very empirical way, even art.' Nogueira

8. Henry Gaudier-Brzeska Sculptures, Kettle's Yard Talks (10th February)- the influence of Wild Thing stretches far. Brzeska has his own attic of work in the Kettle's Yard house and I am looking forward to hearing the enigmatic curator Sebastiano Barassi talk.

9. Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta- This year I discovered Finlay's garden, his contained sculpted world, just as the season was ending. I did not have time to organise a trip to Edinburgh (it would have had to coincide with the Pope's visit) and missed the dying autumn moments of the garden. When the season opens again this year I will use it as an excuse to make a trip up to the beautiful city of Edinburgh and engineer a visit to my friends in St.Andrews. The thought of the garden makes me a little feverish with excitement.

10. Future Beauty- 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Barbican- This is a postponed trip from 2010, my friend Ralph and I are going to make a trip, it will put Chinese Vogue in to an Eastern context and give us the perfect opportunity to reminisce.

The Eric Gill Pilgrimage

The Eric Gill pilgrimage turned out to be providential. I had planned out my landmarks but was unaware how close they were together; Oxford Circus, Victoria and South Kensington formed a tightly bound prism on the tube map. Then there was the Itsu (www.itsu.com) opposite Portland Place which provided the perfect lunch and the unexpected Gill sculptures which greeted me as I entered the V&A. When I emerged from the underground at Oxford Circus I could already see the beacon of broadcasting house beckoning from just behind the lines of Christmas shoppers.

In 1932 Gill produced the Prospero and Ariel sculptures which still furnish the exterior of BBC broadcasting house. The BBC chose Shakespeare's The Tempest as a theme in order to make a cultural statement. Prospero was an 'airy' spirit who represented the airwaves of broadcasting. However Gill adapted the sculpture to his own beliefs about culture. And so Prospero and Ariel become God the Father and God the Son. When I arrive at broadcasting house in the flesh all I can see is Eric Gill's big joke on the BBC.

I assume that Gill's sculptures are details hardly noticed as commuters, businessmen and shoppers pass them by. However they are beautiful. I particularly like the detail of the wave that rides the building round as a trimming. I have seen so many photographs of these recently that I don't know what it means to have a set of my own, whether it will mean anything? Nevertheless I get in to the road and flutter about the steps of Langham church making a fool of myself with my camera.

‘Had not Prospero power over the immortal gods? At any rate it seemed to be only right and proper that I should see the matter in as bright a light as possible and so I took it upon me to portray God the father and God the son. For even if that were not Shakespeare’s meaning it ought to be the BBC’s’ Eric Gill

For Eric Gill the light of religion illuminates all creation.

My second stop, and what I assumed was my final, in the short pilgrimage was Westminster Cathedral. In the bitter cold as Christmas is nearing The Stations of the Cross with a little Catholic liturgy thrown in for good measure, seemed satisfyingly appropriate (probably more suited to Easter, but as a heathen I only have a gentle feel for these things). As a raging Catholic sculptor, although relatively unheard of at the time, Gill was asked to furnish the Cathedral's pillars with carvings of the Fourteen stations of the cross. This is Gill's 'Epic' just as The Anathemata is David Jones's; it communicates the whole history of a people and culture even if this history is uniquely that of Religion and the Passion. Mounted on pillars in Westminster these succeed in being epic.

Only one photo for you as the angles were awkward, although I did get some beautiful postcards so perhaps I will share those as a treat eventually. Red lettering and Gold details add subtle decoration, to a stark but beautifully conceived sculpture.

The final joy of the day was arriving at the V&A believing I had, had my warm cosy fill of Gill, only to be confronted by a preparatory carving for Prospero and Ariel in an alcove. I had unwittingly stumbled upon a new landmark in my pilgrimage.

To supplement my endless reading on lettering and typography there were framed tablets of Gill's typefaces. He donated them so that they could be studied by the V&A's legacy. You have no idea how often I have consulted black and white reproductions of these, now I am the student poring over them.

Gill's sculpture Mankind is a female cipher for the power of his sculpting. She is a luxurious decapitated monument to sexuality and the sensuality of stone. Gill admired tradition with such fervour but he commands a space in the centre of it all. I spent a long, long time absorbing buttocks, indents, curves and Gill's own deep admiration of the female form. Here she is for your enjoyment.

You can deny Eric Gill many things, but not this appreciation. In the V&A Fiona McCarthy's biographical revelations are irrelevancies, Eric Gill is a modern British sculptor whose influence stretches across the exhibition hall from Robert Gibbings to the student of lettering.

My Art History

I am in London today, so here is a bit of a rushed post, apologies for picture quality, it's my blackberry it doesn't do anything justice!

The beginnings of an art book sculpture

While I am back Home, Home and have my whole life in boxes before me I have decided to organise some of the many things I have collected over the years. I am beginning to trip over postcards of artworks, gallery maps, exhibition leaflets and posters and so I am going to try and make a scrapbook of them all. So they don't go to waste but also to preserve them amongst my thoughts. Here are a few pictures of the chaos.

I can already see some interesting things collaged here; Miquel Barcelo's watercolours, Goya's bullfighting etchings, and a bit of Sonia Delaney!

I am going to make a scrapbook, but I need to buy photo-corners first so that I don't destroy anything with glue. I hope that some more interesting posts will come out of this excursion in re-discovery. My mother informs me we do in fact have a scanner, so expect more beautiful, good quality images, soon.

Meanwhile in London. Today I am going on my Eric Gill Pilgrimage; to see the Prospero and Ariel sculpture on the exterior of BBC's Broadcasting House and The Fourteen Stations of the cross at Westminster Cathedral.

AND if I don't get lost I might wander to the V&A to see the exhibition of Camera-less photography which is reviewed beautifully here;
http://aestheticamagazine.blogspot.com/2010/12/camera-less-photography-at-ingleby.html
and an even bigger if, I happen to be at the V&A at the right time I will go see this;
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/contemporary/mat-collishaw/index.html
having discovered Matt Collishaw at the Fitz the other day.

If only Ben Nicholson would design my curtains

You may remember me writing that one of my highlights at Kettles Yard was Ben Nicholson's print on fabric which the Ede's appeared to have used as a bathroom blind. Here it is!

Letters and numbers, c.1933

Nicholson's linocut is an energetic algorithm speaking an abstract language. His letters and numbers appear to jump in their repetitions across the fabric avoiding direct meaning and communication. There is a framed version of the print in the corridor but it is the version in the bathroom which I like the most. I might be leaping to wild imaginative conclusions but it's display on a curtain rail makes it look like a blind. I think this speaks volumes about the function of art (something which David Jones and Eric Gill are always discussing); giving Nicholson's print a function imbues it with all kinds of richness and locates it firmly within the house. Anyway these are the nasty curtains I have to contend with in my college bedroom instead:

If only Ben Nicholson would design me a set of curtains!